WordPress 4.8 will be released soon – what’s going to change?

The new version of WordPress core, WordPress 4.8 is expected to be released this week, around June 8. The new version will provide a few small, but still useful improvements and features. The changes apply both to the admin panel and the front end side. In our experience, the new features serve especially users new to WordPress.

We took a head start and installed the Beta 2 version of WordPress and tested the new features. When the final version is ready and published, we will update our customers’ sites to the newest version.

New widgets: Audio and video easier than ever

Widgets are an easy way to add different, more complex features to a simple web page. Audio, image and video widgets were added to make it easier to add media straight to your web page. For instance, you can attach a YouTube video to your sidebar with just a few clicks.

The text widget used to be merely a simple plaintext editor where you could write HTML tags if you wanted. Now you can use the visually pleasing, easy to use visual edit mode, which has a similar interface as the post edit screen. This makes it much easier to use the text widget if you are not that familiar with HTML.

An improved graphical editor

Navigating between text and inline elements, such as links, is made to be more intuitive in the new TinyMCE. You should give it a try to see the difference!

Easily see the events near you

Dashboard’s “Events and News” widget now provides a way to define a city and to show you events and news that are near you. This way you will not miss a single WordCamp or meetup again.

Upgrading to 4.8

If you are a client of Seravo, you can just lay back and relax while we update and test your page to the newest version. On other pages the update is done by pressing the “Update now” -button in the dashboard’s Update view.

When updated, it’s good practice to test that the theme and all the plugins are compatible with the new version of WordPress. If even one plugin is incompatible with the new WordPress, can the site, or parts of it, stop working. We at Seravo make the tests automically.

Have you tested the new WordPress 4.8? Leave a comment below and tell us how you feel about the changes! Is there still a feature missing in WordPress core?